The celebrated author, Frank Graham, Jr. is perhaps best known for a variety of popular publications including Since Silent Spring, books on the New York Giants and Casey Stengel.

He also wrote the first biography of Margaret Chase Smith. It came out in 1963, just as she was launching her trail blazing campaign for the presidency. Early parts of the work are devoted to the remarkable career of Smith’s husband, Congressman Clyde Smith, who as a candidate for public office 49 times died without having ever lost a single one of them. Worthy of a book in his own right, Graham makes this observation about some of Clyde Smith’s personal passions:

Past Prologue

“Though he did not smoke or drink, he put away enormous quantities of chocolate candies while engaging in another of his favorite pastimes, poker.”

Growing up in Farmington — a community not far from the Smith family Skowhegan roots — I had been aware of innuendo about one of Clyde Smith’s less discreet interests. This came to me at any rate while sitting in Frank Howatt’s barber chair on Broadway in Farmington in the late 1960s. Howatt, then in his late 70s, the patriarch of a venerable family who had followed in his footsteps in the same profession, had traveled throughout this area of Maine in his trade. At one time he had put in time in Smith’s home town. He was a repository of perhaps apocryphal but nevertheless entertaining conversation. I naturally asked him about Margaret Chase Smith. Part of his reply to me was how she had suffered from a husband with a wandering eye. At this time I had relegated this story to the genre of spurious gossip likely originating from some disgruntled Somerset County political adversary. I gave it little credence.

Fast forward to the late summer of 1990. “The Senator,” the name to which she often responded, was now nearly 93. She was as physically well preserved and mentally alert as anyone half her age. The only disability was her failing eyesight but her mind’s eye and mental vision was as sharp as ever.

Though on several occasions over the years I had been part of small groups that included her and her late aide and companion, Bill Lewis, the occasion now was her invitation to myself and my fiance — who like Smith was also from Skowhegan, to dine out. This was at one of the town’s premiere establishments, the Heritage House. It being a Wednesday night and the only parties in our private corner being just four of us, who included the senator’s close friend retired Navy Capt. Georgia McKearly it was an occasion for candid interactions.

One figure about whom I asked, for example, was former Maine Senator and Governor Ralph Owen Brewster — a summa cum laude graduate of Bowdoin and mesmerizing if controversial political contemporary of the Senator and her husband. Based on his 1947 Congressional confrontation with Howard Hughes over the perceived limitations of Hughes “Spruce Goose“ flying ship, he would by 2004 become the only 20th century Maine politician prominently featured in an Academy Award winning movie, the Brewster role portrayed by Alan Alda.

I mentioned that the book on Brewster was the reason he at mid-career dropped the “Ralph” from his name was in honor of his son, who died from an infection as a teenager. Not necessarily, the Senator claimed. It also was so that he would not be mistaken for being Irish, something more likely if the name had remained “Ralph O. Brewster.”

She of course also harbored understandable resentment against Brewster due to his association with Joseph McCarthy at a time when Smith courageously took on McCarthy over his witch hunting tactics. That resentment was not ameliorated when a few days before Brewster died in 1961 he put upon Smith to borrow a rare book from her that he could not find elsewhere. His promise to “get it right back” to her remained unfulfilled at his death.

In the hours we spent that night over dinner and a tour of her residence afterwards I also mentioned her husband, Clyde Smith. She then, now in 1990, just a half century after his death, still nurtured admiration and affection for him. She had worn with pride for years after his death in 1940 an engagement ring he had given her. She recalled how at a speaking engagement at a mid-western university about 1954 she had briefly removed it to warm her hands. Somehow in the hectic pressure of the moment she misplaced it. A frantic search ensued but she could not locate it. So upset by this after returning to Washington she hired a clairvoyant to ascertain where it might be. The clairvoyant reported that she saw a university groundskeeper had picked it up but could not nail down his identify with sufficient specificity so that the senator was ever able to retrieve it.

Her sentiments about her husband became somewhat tempered, however, when I mentioned his interest in chocolates. Her somewhat — to me at any rate — unexpected rejoinder, was “Yes, he liked chocolates and — with an added emphasis he liked the ladies.”

It was not a passage one finds in Frank Graham’s book. It did, however, verify the more small town anecdotal report of Frank Howatt. The credibility of your local barber should not be easily discounted.

Paul H. Mills is a Farmington attorney well known for his history and analyses of public affairs in Maine. He can be reached  pmills@myfairpoint.net.